2009/07/03

Playing and learning

My profiling project is currently in the state where I can’t really show any pictures or code, since I’m fighting with various edge cases that one can bump into while writing a multithreaded distributed graphical application. In short, remote graphing has already been working since the beginning of the week, but there are stability issues that need to be ironed out before the next release, and it’s taking longer than I anticipated...

Until then, let me bring another program into your attention. It is a Bloxorz clone in Haskell, available through cabal in the bloxorz package. It is more limited than the original, and only features three levels, but the essence is there. This rendition was made by a student of mine, Viktor Devecseri, for a ‘practical functional programming’ class I’ve been teaching for one and a half years. This is an optional class available to students of electrical engineering and informatics (at our university, the latter involves a fair amount of both CS and IT), who don’t necessarily have any non-mainstream programming background.

The point of the class is basically to give students a wider perspective by exposing them to functional programming. The primary language of the course is Haskell, but I also talk about Hume, and the last time I dedicated a lesson to Timber too, as the official name of the course is Embedded Functional Programming for historical reasons. We even used Hume to control Mindstorms NXT robots and a Tmote Sky sensor the first time this class was held, but this proved to be a bit too complicated due to the lacking toolset for this language, so the topic slowly shifted towards general practical FP. While one might argue that Haskell is not the most practical language, it is definitely among the few languages that’s both useful for real-life purposes and can broaden one’s mind to a great extent.

I always take the time to ask everyone about their learning experience, what they found easy or hard while working on their assignment. Since students can have rather different past experiences, I let everyone choose the topic on their own, the only constraint being that the program should be interactive in some way. In other words, I don’t want to see pure data grinding, because there is another class with that focus, and it’s probably more rewarding for newcomers to see something move and respond right away.

While talking to Viktor, he had remark that the approach being ‘not object oriented enough’ (I hope I’m not misquoting him too much here) was somewhat inconvenient. Afterwards, we had a little conversation about FP being a completely different approach to modularisation than OO. Nevertheless, even if I have a few years of experience with functional languages, I still found it hard to respond to questions pertaining concrete problems. I believe it would help a lot if there was some kind of tutorial on designing real-life applications in the style of Why Functional Programming Matters. Is there such a guide somewhere, or only in the brains of experienced people and scattered everywhere across the web? My dear readers, please help me out!

Yes, RWH is nice and it is actually in the list of references available for the class, but I was also told by some students that they found the part about setting up a development environment somewhat lacking. I know about the existence of SOE too, although I never read it, so I can’t comment on its readability.